Recently I had a chance to take a look at Redis project, which is semi-persistent in memory database with idea somethat similar to memcache but richer feature set. Redis has simple single process event driven design, which means it does not have to deal with any locks which is performance killer for a lot of [...]
Crashes while using MyISAM with multiple key caches
Over last couple of years I have ran into random MySQL crashes in production when multiple key caches were used. Unfortunately this never was frequent or critical enough issue so I could spend time creating repeatable test case and search of the bug in the MySQL database did not find anything. Recently we had this [...]
Getting annoyed with MyISAM multiple key caches.
As I’ve wrote few times using multiple key caches is a great way to get CPU scalability if you’re using MyISAM. It is however very annoying – this feature really looks half baked to me. The problem with multiple key caches and mapping of tables to the different files is – there is no way [...]
How much memory can MySQL use in the worst case?
I vaguely recall a couple of blog posts recently asking something like “what’s the formula to compute mysqld’s worst-case maximum memory usage?” Various formulas are in wide use, but none of them is fully correct. Here’s why: you can’t write an equation for it.
Using Multiple Key Caches for MyISAM Scalability
I have written before – MyISAM Does Not Scale, or it does quite well – two main things stopping you is table locks and global mutex on the KeyCache. Table Locks are not the issue for Read Only workload and write intensive workloads can be dealt with by using with many tables but Key Cache [...]
Beware of MyISAM Key Cache mutex contention
Today I was working with the client loading data to MyISAM tables at very high rate. Hundreds of millions rows are loaded daily into single MySQL instance with bursts up to 100K of records/sec which need to be inserted (in the table with few indexes). It was good not all records had to go to [...]
MySQL Performance on Memory Appliance
Recently I have had a chance to check out MySQL Performance on “Memory Appliance” by Violin Memory which can be used as extremely high speed storage system. I helped Violin Memory to optimize MySQL for customer workload and Violin memory and also had a chance to do some benchmarks on my own. 2*Quad Core Xeon [...]
Heikki Tuuri Innodb answers – Part I
Its almost a month since I promised Heikki Tuuri to answer Innodb Questions. Heikki is a busy man so I got answers to only some of the questions but as people still poking me about this I decided to publish the answers I have so far. Plus we may get some interesting follow up questions [...]
MyISAM Scalability and Innodb, Falcon Benchmarks
We many times wrote about InnoDB scalability problems, this time We are faced with one for MyISAM tables. We saw that several times in synthetic benchmarks but never in production, that’s why we did not escalate MyISAM scalability question. This time working on the customer system we figured out that box with 1 CPU Core [...]
MySQL Users Conference – Innodb
It might look like it is too late to write about stuff happened at Users Conference but I’m just starting find bits of time from processing accumulated backlog. The Theme of this Users Conference was surely Storage Engines both looking at number of third party storage engine presented, main marketing message – Storage Engine partnership [...]

